Backchannelmedia

Press-Telegram Long Beach, CA.

By John Canalis

Whether your TV is tuned to TBS, PBS or CBS, the world's largest collector of viewing data could soon know about it.

Nielsen Media Research will in about six weeks gain access to the viewing patterns of Charter Communications' customers who subscribe to digital cable in Long Beach and Signal Hill.

Charter will only share viewers' ZIP codes, not names, addresses or other identifying information, executives say.

Though privacy advocates have already rung the warning bells, the company says that viewers' personal information will be wiped away before it leaves Charter property.

"There is no way anybody could track back to any particular set- top box," says Jim Heneghan, senior vice president for advertising sales. "We have pretty strict privacy rules here at Charter. We make sure that no PII - personally identifiable information - gets to our vendors."

Long Beach-area homes are among the 300,000-plus affected homes in Southern California that will be used in the pilot program with Nielsen, which the Los Angeles Times first reported last week.

Charter officials tout the Southland's diverse demographics as a good way to cull information about national viewing patterns.

There are 75,680 households with Charter in Long Beach and Signal Hill (disclosure: mine is among them).

Of those, Long Beach has 50,625 digital customers; Signal Hill, 1,313. The rest of the homes have analog cable.

"Long Beach has one of the highest digital penetrations in the country," says Craig Watson, vice president of Communications at Charter's Long Beach headquarters.

Charter will sell aggregated and anonymous data to Nielsen from only the digital customers. This information should prove highly valuable to advertisers seeking highly specific information - what shows are popular in certain neighborhoods.

The research giant will then comb through the data, analyze it and adjust for errors (estimating when a viewer has fallen asleep, for instance) and sell the information to networks and media firms that sell blocks of advertising.

Advertisers want more accountability and a better picture of how long viewers are watching, Heneghan says from his Denver office.

"The currency for buying media is whether they are staying in the commercial pod," he says. "What are they doing during the commercial break? Are they staying on the channel? Are they staying on the network?"

Advertisers are increasingly concerned that users of digital video recorders such as TiVo are skipping commercials.

However, the technology being used for the arrangement between Charter and Nielsen will not be able to track the playback of recorded shows. The new system only monitors real-time viewing.

Advertisers can learn a lot about what types of audience they reach on the Internet, and they are increasingly demanding similar data from those that provide cable television, Heneghan says.

"It all comes back to how people consume entertainment and how they consume advertising," he adds.

Under the traditional system, Nielsen uses a far smaller sample - less than 1,000 homes in the L.A. area, and 13,000 nationwide - to monitor viewing habits that can make or break a show.

Statisticians and other researchers apply quantitative methods to the small samples and estimate viewing habits for larger, national audiences.

The new method of tracking viewers should reveal how long a couch potato is tuned in to a channel and the intervals at which channels are changed.

Even so, that's too much information to privacy watchdogs.

Paul Stephens, policy and advocacy director for the nonprofit Privacy Rights Clearinghouse in San Diego, says customers routinely, and often unknowingly, accept privacy agreements that offer little protection when they sign up for service.

"They reserve the right to change their policy," he says.

Few customers ever read the fine legal print on their cable agreements, he says.

The privacy group has already called on Charter to give existing customers the option to opt out and for new customers to opt in to the Nielsen sharing agreement.

Anita Lamont, a Charter spokeswoman at national headquarters in St. Louis, says there is no need to opt out because no personal information will be shared.

Since the aggregate data is anonymous, Stephens agrees that the risk rests more with the company storing the data - in this case, Charter - than selling it.

"It's always a possibility that data could be breached," he says.

Charter officials say there are many internal controls, including employee monitoring, to prevent TV-viewing data from being released.

Those who do not want their viewing preferences tracked by cable or satellite TV providers have some options.

Stephens suggests buying a digital antenna, which can be used with a digital television or with an analog TV equipped with a digital converter.

"It's possible to get a very, very clear signal," he says.

The downside is also clear: no cable channels.

john.canalis@presstelegram.com, 562-499-1273.

(c) 2008 Press-Telegram Long Beach, CA.. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All rights Reserved.